Requirements

You need at least a 386 machine (fpu not necessary) with 8 mb ram to
run HAL91. The entire system runs in ram, so you can remove the floppy
after booting. The kernel supports IDE hard disks and ATAPI cdrom
drives. Supported filesystems are ext2, iso9660 and vfat, optional
encryption using AES is possible. Limited support for ethernet cards
(NE2000 only) is also included. Support for scsi adapters, parallel zip
drive and other ethernet cards is possible by loading kernel modules from an
optional package (see below).

What's included?

HAL91 contains the following commands:

bash

bourne again shell

bunzip2

uncompress bzip2 files

bzip2

compress files to .bz2

cat

concatenate files

chmod

change file permissions

chown

change file ownerships

chroot

change root filesystem

copydisk

copy whole disk (16 MB required)

cp

copy files

date

show current date and time

dd

read/write devices and files

df

show free disk space

dmesg

show kernel messages

du

show disk usage

e2fsck

check/repair an ext2 filesystem

elvis

clone of the vi editor

fdisk

partition hard disks

fmt

format text

free

show memory statistics

ftp

ftp client

grep

search for patterns in files (symlinked to rgrep)

gunzip

uncompress gzip files

gzip

compress files to .gz

halt

halt the system

hdparm

show/set hard disk parameters

hostname

show/set hostname

ifconfig

configure network devices

init.net

simple script for configuring ethernet

insmod

load kernel modules

less

display files

ln

create links

loadkeys

load keymaps

losetup

set up loop device (possibly encrypted)

ls

list contents of directory

lsmod

show loaded kernel modules

md5sum

generate/check file checksums

mkdir

create directories

mke2fs

create an ext2 filesystem

mknod

create special device files

mkswap

set up swap partition

more

display files (symlinked to less)

mount

mount filesystem

mv

rename/move files

nc

server/client to copy files over network

open

open virtual consoles

ping

send ICMP requests

ppp-nullmodem

simple script for PPP using nullmodem cable

pppd

PPP daemon

ps

show process status

reset

clear the screen

rgrep

search for patterns in files

rm

remove files/directories

rmmod

remove kernel modules

route

configure network routes

sh

bourne shell (symlinked to bash)

sleep

pause for a specified time

strings

extract strings from files

swapoff

turn off swap (symlinked to swapon)

swapon

turn on swap

sync

synchronize cache with disks

tar

tape archiver

telnet

remote login client

tr

translate characters in files

tree

show a directory tree

umount

unmount filesystem

update

automatic syncing of filesystems

uptime

show uptime and load average

vi

vi editor (symlinked to elvis)

wc

count lines, words and characters in a file

zcat

concatenate gzip compressed file (symlinked to gzip)

zless

display gzip compressed files

Installation procedure

First you need the disk image: hal91.img.
If you are using DOS/Windows, you also need
rawrite2.exe. Then put a blank floppy disk
in your drive.

At the command line, type in the following:

on Unix/Linux systems: dd if=hal91.img of=/dev/fd0

on DOS/Windows systems: rawrite2 -f hal91.img -d a:

If your browser corrupts the disk image, try this
link. Note that this is not a zip archive. Just rename the file
hal91.zip to hal91.img after downloading.

Optional start script

After booting, HAL91 looks for a file hal91.rc on the floppy. If the
file exists, it is executed as a shell script. You can use this feature
for automating tasks at boot time.

Optional packages

The following packages do not fit on the disk. However, after booting
HAL91, they can be unpacked in the /bin directory with the
command tar xzf package.tgz.